CRITICAL PERSPECTIVESEngagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STSCurated and Introduced by Kristina Lyons, Juno Parreñas and Noah Tamarkin
Kristina Lyons
University of California, Santa Cruz
krlyons@ucsc.edu

Juno Salazar Parreñas
Ohio State University
junoparrenas@gmail.com

Noah Tamarkin
Ohio State University
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
ntamarkin@gmail.com Introduction

This is not a manifesto, nor is it a prescriptive call for a new,
decolonial, or decolonized science and technology studies (STS).
Instead, our critical perspectives in this issue are propositional
offerings. We aim to provoke questions about how science and technology
studies might intersect with decolonizing or decolonial practices and
scholarship, and what kinds of openings these intersections may or may
not provide. We offer these reflections as invitations to think with us
and to consider the worlds in which we live and work. They are entries
into a conversation that, of course, does not start or end with us, but
rather draws upon multiple intellectual genealogies and particular
struggles and colonial histories.

One intellectual genealogy that inspires some of us has been given the
moniker of postcolonial science and technology studies. We find
affinity in what Warwick Anderson emphasizes in his description of the
work of Helen Verran (2001, 2002) and David Turnbull (2000) as the
“messy politics that emerge out of local performances of technoscience”
(W. Anderson, 2002, p. 650), and in the work of Anna Tsing (1993) as
she disturbs ideas of centers and peripheries and shows politics in
what could otherwise be analyzed through an overly narrow actor-network
theory (W. Anderson & Adams, 2008). Anne Pollock and Banu
Subramaniam (2016) and their special journal issue on feminist
postcolonial STS also build on this thread in their efforts to think
through the possibilities of justice in postcolonial technoscience.
However, in the shared spirit of Audre Lorde’s (1984) perspective on
the generative power of difference, we find that the sign of feminist
postcolonial science and technology studies is not always capacious
enough to include our commitments. In the worlds to which we are
committed and in which we circulate, what is considered science or
technoscience is far from stable, what justice would mean is neither
certain nor predetermined, and what role the (postcolonial or colonial)
nation-state plays is not always a centralized hegemony.

Working against colonialism, imperialism, and white heteropatriarchal
supremacy takes many languages and vocabularies. Theories of
postcolonialism, decolonization, and decoloniality each offer different
analytical and practical tools and challenges. All are grounded in
particular historical conditions, spatial locations, colonial
temporalities, intellectual legacies, political proposals, and
contemporary geopolitics of knowledge that may share certain
commonalities while also diverging in their interests. For us, the
keywords to delineate are decolonization and decoloniality.
While these may appear to point to similar concerns about the ongoing
legacies of colonization and efforts to think and do otherwise, these
terms are not necessarily interchangeable and do not resonate in the
same ways in different places and among different scholars, even among
the three of us as coauthors of this introduction.

Decolonization is a concept that has become increasingly widespread and
multivalent in scholarship and social movements alike and we in turn
engage with it in diverse ways in the essays that follow. Scholarly
genealogies of decolonization inspire us to recognize the continuation
of struggles for liberation, self-determination, and sovereignty
following World War II, contemporary iterations of coloniality and
settler colonialism, and possibilities to imagine and incite otherwise
(Abdulgani, 1955; Fanon, 1965, 1967; Lugones, 2010; Ngũgĩ wa, 1986;
A. Simpson, 2014; TallBear, 2013). For example, Frantz Fanon’s 1950s
and 1960s inquiries into the psychological violence wrought by the
identifications of the colonized with the colonizer and Fanon’s embrace
of violent, revolutionary struggle as a means of transforming and
healing this foundational colonial violence have renewed relevance for
scholars and activists working through what has and has not been
achieved by postcolonial states and what other presents and futures
might be possible.

What is commonly regarded as science has, on the one hand, served as an
arm of colonization and European political, cultural, and intellectual
domination. On the other hand, it can offer a potential means of
decolonization (Smith, 1999). In this issue, Noah Tamarkin highlights
one such example, in which DNA tests get interpreted in different kinds
of ways and by different kinds of communities. Efforts by educational
institutions to teach and foster indigenous languages like Myaamia can
be construed as another example (Leonard, 2011; Mosley-Howard, Baldwin,
Ironstrack, Rousmaniere, & Burke, 2016). Yet another example is in
the institutional work described by Audra Simpson to decolonize
Columbia University, which she discussed at a plenary of the 2016
National Women’s Studies Association meeting in Montreal. Simpson’s
students have led a campaign to divest from fossil fuels and have held
teach-ins on Standing Rock. Additionally, students at Columbia
University’s Native American Council have compelled the university to
recognize officially that it is built on Lenape land. These are all
crucial actions towards recognizing genocide, land theft, and their
ongoing legacies. However, some question whether institutions of higher
education can ever be decolonized, given that they are so firmly
entrenched in hierarchical ways of knowing, as Lesley Green suggested
at the 2016 Society for the Social Studies of Science meeting in
Barcelona. What decolonization could look like is not always
self-evident, as Juno Salazar Parreñas considers in this issue.

As we think with contemporary decolonizing invocations, we also remain
cognizant of decades of scholarship that positioned itself as
anticolonial, in contrast to a postcolonial that is defined as a period
of time following colonization instead of a time that indicates ongoing
colonialism (B.R.O.G. Anderson, 2005; Hall, 1996; Ileto, 1992; L.R.
Simpson, 2004). We recognize that there are multiple forms of
colonization and that empires do not easily fall on a linear time scale
of world history. Rather, empires, with their differently aspirational
forms of colonization and domination, were and are conversant across
space and connective across time. For example, the Qing Empire drew
upon aspects of the Ottoman and Portuguese empires (Stoler, McGranahan,
& Perdue, 2007). If we were to force a timeline of colonial models,
we would too easily fall into the traps of world systems theory, with a
Eurocentric sense of time, linearity, and implicit ideas of progress
that risks upholding European domination as a natural force with little
resistance—which would be historically false (Agard-Jones, 2013;
Trouillot, 1995). Another risk of such a timeline that centers European
colonialism would be its potential to romanticize the precolonial or
decolonization as devoid of oppression, which would ignore past and
ongoing patriarchal hegemonies, as Banu Subramaniam suggests in this
issue.

During a specific historical juncture, as Tania Pérez-Bustos and
Kristina Lyons point out in their interventions, Latin American and
diaspora-based scholars mainly located in the United States linked
decoloniality in a triad with modernity and coloniality (Castro-Gómez,
2005) and also authored important concepts such as the “coloniality of
power” (Quijano, 2000). These scholars pull the horizon of debates on
modernity back to the late fifteenth century, and extend them southward
to take into account the colonial and imperial activities of southern
European countries such as Spain and Portugal in the conquest of the
Americas and the role these processes played in the making of a
capitalist world system. More recent North American conversations on
decoloniality in settler-colonial contexts stress the consideration of
socio-ecological relations and sovereignty not through forms of
liberalism and multiculturalist inclusion, but through situated,
land-based political struggles that may at times be incommensurable
with social justice projects at large, including feminism (Arvin, Tuck,
& Morrill, 2013; Tuck & Yang, 2012).

While much science-studies work has looked to the past to understand
how we came to view science and technology as of the West and as rooted
in colonial and imperial power, our purpose is to engage decoloniality
and/or decolonization in and at the interfaces
of science and technology studies. The idea of the interface is
crucial. Like Marisol de la Cadena and Marianne E. Lien et al. (2015),
we enjoy teetering on the boundary, inside and outside STS, just as
many of us enjoy the exchanges and political potential of
cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary, and intersectional inquiry. The
preposition in is crucial as well: we address ourselves here to ongoing
conversations within STS in the hopes of continuing to push its
boundaries.

We began our conversation by engaging with a series of questions that
emerged from the situated contexts where we live and work (Haraway,
1988). We asked ourselves: What might the lens of decoloniality or
decolonization render imaginable in the worlds and world-making
processes we study? What term(s) speak to the worlds and the
world-making relations with which we are concerned, and what tensions
can be uncovered in the distinctions between these terms (decolonization, decoloniality, and postcolonialism,
for example)? Finally, why (or why not) decolonization or decoloniality
now, in relation to STS and its interfaces? The critical perspectives
herein consider the utility and limitations of these terms as they each
engage in spaces of scientific knowledge production and in other
world-making projects.

Banu Subramaniam’s intervention troubles any easy association between
anticolonial rhetoric and liberatory policies by discussing the ways
the actions and ideology of the Hindu right appear to recolonize India
while making promises of decolonization. Similarly, Noah Tamarkin
thinks through the historical complexities of Lemba DNA testing in
South Africa as a tool for enlisting science in the service of
decolonizing goals and also a political object that could buttress
apartheid oppression. Juno Salazar Parreñas proposes that the project
of orangutan rehabilitation on Borneo opens up difficult questions
about whose vision of liberation or independence comes to matter in
decolonization. Lesley Green suggests that decoloniality begins with a
transformation of how we think about what it is to know within the
context of contemporary South African environmental management.
Kristina Lyons shares ethnographic lessons learned with farmers in the
Colombian Amazon to propose the conceptual and political importance of
considering decolonizing enactments and versions of asymmetry, while
Tania Pérez-Bustos asks whether a certain idea of decoloniality used by
academics in northern contexts may be reproducing a neocolonial
geopolitics of knowledge.

Our intention is not to affirm that it is possible or even desirable to
“decolonize STS,” but rather to explore how decolonial and/or
decolonizing analytics and struggles may or may not take on relevance
through different forms of engagement and how these analytics might
inform our scholarship. Thus, we attempt to bring together different
experiences of colonialism, decolonization, and decoloniality that are
rarely placed in discussion together to ask what may be learned from
the exercise of doing so.

Postcolonial STS has proved immensely useful in my work in
understanding the trajectory of science in India. After its
independence in 1947, India embarked on a path to modernity, grounding
its hopes for the future in the promises of science and technology,
industrialization being the mode to modernity. Governments developed
five-year and ten-year plans in creating large-scale infrastructure
projects and industrial development. India invested in scientific
research and centers, largely conceived and engaging with international
networks in India’s quest for modernity, i.e., investing in
institutions that promoted knowledge on and about “Western” science and
technology. Postcolonial and decolonial scholars remind us that
“Western” science and technology is an overdetermined category,
rendering invisible the transnational circulations of science. While
this is undoubtedly true, it is also interesting that the practices of
“science” in postcolonial India (Prasad, 2014)— the various patents,
innovations, and, more importantly, the narratives at the center of the
science and technology imaginary—have always been located squarely in
the West (Goonatilake, 1984). Postcolonial India has seen few new or
novel discoveries and innovations developed for the Indian context. I
suspect these are narratives ripe for new interpretations, and an
important site of analyses for postcolonial STS.

I enter this discussion on postcolonialism and decolonialism troubled
by recent political developments in India. Over the last three decades,
we have witnessed a steady rise in religious nationalism, in particular
Hindu nationalism. Drawing on the region’s past, Hindu nationalism
reframes this past as decidedly “Hindu” and grounds its jingoistic
appeals to reimagine India as a “Hindu” nation for Hindu people. The
rhetoric of Hindu nationalists is decidedly anticolonial. They contend
that colonialism and various colonial powers have erased the
contributions of an ancient Vedic civilization and decimated the
immense science and technological capacities of India. Hindu
nationalists are equally critical of the postcolonial and secular
state, which they feel has ignored India’s ancient legacies. India,
they argue, must throw away these colonial shackles, reinvigorate
itself by taking pride in its past, and reimagine itself as a science
and technological superpower. In particular, Hindu nationalists claim
Western science as their own, as an outgrowth of ancient Vedic science
and technologies. Thus, to religious nationalists, India’s past and
present, science and religion, modernity and orthodoxy blend
effortlessly into a coherent ideology for a modern Hindu nation.

A steady rise of Hindu nationalism over the decades finally saw the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) come to sole power in the elections in
2014. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, ran on a platform of
“development” nationalism (Express Tribune,
2014, 7 April). In particular, the development platform has gone hand
in hand with a neoliberal platform of an extractive economy,
emphasizing privatization.

Characterizing this government on the postcolonial/decolonial axis is
difficult, since their practices and rhetoric align with neither. It
may be more accurate to talk of the BJP as espousing a decolonizing
vision rather than a decolonial one. Its rhetoric promises to take
India out of its colonial past into a modern and global future of a
Hindu India. While its vision and rhetoric are decidedly anticolonial
and claims to have the goal of decolonizing India, they are perhaps
best understood as recolonizing.

For example, the government has embraced extractive mining
technologies, high-input agriculture, and industrialization alongside a
robust nuclear weapons program. Indeed, it was the past coalition
government headed by the Hindu right that tested nuclear fission in
Pokhran in 1998. In contrast, there has been little public investment
in health care, education, or poverty reduction. The environmental
consequences of development have been largely ignored. We have also
seen a wholesale revival in narratives of a sophisticated, modern,
ancient India with superior science and technological capabilities.
These claims of modern technology in ancient India are not a revival of
new epistemologies or ontologies of science, or even a challenge of
Western science. Rather, they are a wholesale embrace of Western
science as Hindu science. These include claims that modern practices of
surrogacy, plastic surgery, genomics, evolution, atomic physics, air
travel, chemistry, architecture, fluid dynamics, geology, botany, and
zoology have their roots in the Puranas and Vedas.
These claims have been repeated by members of the Hindu right
(including the prime minister), as well as other party members and
government officials. Further, we have seen the revival of many
purported ancient sciences such as numerology, astrology, yoga, and vaastushastra
as new consumerist technologies. This growth appears alongside the rise
of numerous sadhus and God men/women, each of who embraces science and
technology in various capacities in their ashrams (green technology,
green agriculture, patenting techniques of meditation and yoga) as the
new sites of Hindu modernity (Kumar, 2013).

As always, the embrace of modern science/technology comes alongside
regressive gender and caste politics. Hateful rhetoric and violence
against religious minorities have increased at an alarming rate. The
rhetoric of modesty for women, the need to protect Hindu women, and an
ideological vision that puts women back in the home have flourished.
Recently, a politician repeated the long-enduring suggestion of asking
women to dress modestly in order not to invite rape. The government
continues to support the colonial-era laws of Indian Penal Code 377,
which criminalizes sexual acts that are “against the order of nature”;
these laws are used to harass, intimidate, and brutalize
nonheteronormative sexual subjects. The government has also sought to
abolish commercial surrogacy for anyone who is not a member of a
heterosexual married couple from India (The Hindu, 26 August).

Despite the use of anticolonial rhetoric and the promises of
decolonization, the actions and ideology of the Hindu right appear
instead to recolonize India, contrary to any sense of liberatory
politics. Indeed, the reality on the ground promotes colonial-era laws.
Victorian visions of sexuality are reinscribed in the name of Hindu
modernity. India offers a sobering account of certain kinds of logics
of decolonization. Only a feminist and antiracist politics allows us to
see the dangers of such a vision.

I ground my approach to potential decolonizing possibilities in
relation to genetic ancestry in my research with Lemba people. The
Lemba are black South Africans who became internationally known as
“black Jews” after they participated in genetic ancestry studies in the
1980s and 1990s that aimed to test whether their oral history of
descent from Jews could be genetically substantiated. In my research, I
focus on three questions: How and why did genetic ancestry become
imaginable and desirable for Lemba people? How does DNA matter socially
and politically? And how might the answer to that question be different
if we approach Lemba people as producers of genetic knowledge rather
than simply as research subjects who are caught up in the desires and
politics of geneticists?

At the heart of my research, then, is a shift in perspective that I
think raises important questions about decolonization in relation to
science and technology and also potentially in relation to science and
technology studies. There is much to be said about the colonial,
postcolonial, and potentially decolonizing politics of genetic and
genomic research in South Africa. For example, some have analyzed South
African genomic research in relation to colonial histories and both
established and emergent forms of identity and belonging (Bystrom,
2009; Erasmus, 2013; Schramm, 2016). South African geneticists have
also considered colonial and apartheid legacies as they have debated
the potential benefits and challenges of postapartheid South African
genomics projects that aim to more ethically obtain and use South
African genetic samples to produce research that can benefit South
Africans (de Vries and Pepper, 2012; Hardy et al., 2008; Ramsay, 2014;
Slabbert & Pepper, 2010; Soodyall, 2003). Others working in science
and technology studies have considered the extent to which geneticists’
claims that a postcolonial, postapartheid genomics characterized by
robust community involvement, informed consent, and espoused antiracism
might be transformative or even possible (Benjamin 2009, Foster 2016).
Going forward, these debates and discussions will necessarily be
informed by new ethical guidelines published by the South African San
Institute that are addressed directly to potential researchers
(including geneticists) to govern any future proposed research with San
people, who have been the research subjects of many past genetic
studies: these guidelines are also an opening through which to imagine
decolonizing possibilities (South African San Institute, 2017). But my
focus on former research subjects, rather than on ideal futures or on
geneticists or genetic discourses, frames South African genetics
differently. I argue that genetic studies are not the culmination of
the meaning of DNA but rather, simply, one starting point; so by
extension, it is the motivations and actions of research subjects, as
much as or more so than those of scientists, that might help us to
analyze the relation between genetics and decolonization.

So why did Lemba people decide to participate in genetic ancestry
studies? From the early twentieth century and perhaps earlier, they had
struggled to be known as ethnically distinct from the Venda and Pedi
people among whom they lived. These identity-based struggles became
more consequential under apartheid policies that began in the 1950s.
Lemba people, like all black South Africans, were forced to carry
identity passbooks, and in addition to labeling their race, these
passbooks also required them to define themselves ethnically as either
Venda or Northern Sotho—Lemba was not a possible option. These ethnic
labels were also linked to local structures of power and territory in
the form of tribal authorities, chieftaincies, and Bantustan homelands.
The apartheid state considered these homelands to be self-governing and
independent, but in reality they were a means of denying black South
Africans citizenship rights while also dividing them based on ethnicity
and subjecting them to leaders they did not choose. This violently
oppressed all black South Africans, but Lemba people additionally
experienced these policies as erasure. No Lemba chiefs were recognized
by the apartheid government, they had no recognized tribal authorities,
and they were assigned to homelands defined by ethnic labels that they
did not claim. Beginning in the 1980s, when they were first asked to be
part of genetic ancestry research, Lemba leaders saw DNA as a possible
method through which to scientifically substantiate their ethnic
difference and to potentially gain recognition and ethnically defined
authority and territory (Tamarkin, 2011, 2014).

If we think about decolonization as a process through which colonized
people and places move towards forms of sovereignty, then we might read
Lemba genetics as a decolonizing science or, in other words, a project
of enlisting science in the service of decolonizing goals. But it is
not that simple. In the larger context of 1980s and 1990s South African
politics, to seek ethnic recognition and ethnically defined territory
was to accept the logic of apartheid oppression while others were busy
burning passbooks, joining banned political parties, and arming
themselves in efforts to bring down the colonial system that Lemba DNA,
as a political object, could only buttress. These politics, of course,
were not mutually exclusive. Many Lemba people were in fact involved in
these forms of antiapartheid action and did not necessarily see Lemba
ethnic recognition as antithetical to their goals of undermining the
apartheid state and ending apartheid policies: they were able to hold
these contradictions and pursue both strategies simultaneously.

More complex still is how to think about the meaning of Lemba DNA in
the postapartheid present. In recent decades, Lemba leaders have
continued the same struggles for recognition and territory that they,
and in some cases their parents and grandparents, had enacted against
the former apartheid state, now against a postcolonial state. This
postcolonial state recognizes an ideal of generalized multiculturalism
paired with nonracialism, rather than rights and recognition tied to
ethnic difference. It is also a target of new student-led social
movements that explicitly call themselves decolonial and argue that the
statue of Cecil Rhodes must fall, university fees must fall, and Jacob
Zuma—the current South African president—must fall.1

When Lemba people use DNA to petition a postcolonial state, how might
they envision decolonization, and how might that be understood in
relation to others’ decolonial goals? I think that we cannot speak of
decolonizing science and technology without reference to other
invocations of decolonizing and/or decolonial politics that exist in
the same times and places, particularly if we envision science and
technology as situated, dynamic, and contextual.

I’m opening up these complications in thinking through Lemba DNA to
suggest that the questions about decolonization and science and
technology may not be answerable—and that may be part of the point.
There is a distinction here between the potential relation of who or
what we study to the decolonization of science and technology (and also
to other forms of decolonizing politics that may not have anything
explicitly to do with science and technology), and the potential of our
work to further some sort of decolonizing politics alongside with who
or what we study, or in relation to the intellectual projects that
constitute science and technology studies.

I’m not comfortable diagnosing the extent to which one might be able to
analyze Lemba DNA as part of a decolonizing project, but I do think
that a shift in focus from geneticists to research subjects can
potentially be a decolonizing move in three ways. First, it affirms the
knowledge practices of marginalized people who are engaged in a project
of self-determination. Second, it asserts that analyzing scientific
practice is inseparable from colonial, postcolonial, and decolonizing
politics. Third, it opens up the possibility for STS scholars, and
potentially also geneticists, to move away from scientist/nonscientist
and expert/nonexpert binaries when thinking about the source, content,
and meaning of scientific knowledge.

Orangutan Rehabilitation as an Experimental Project of DecolonizationJuno Salazar Parreñas

The project of orangutan rehabilitation is a project of decolonization,
both in the historical and contemporary senses of the term.
Rehabilitation began in 1956 when the Forestry Department of the
British Crown Colony of Sarawak started sending orphaned orangutans to
the home of the curator of the Sarawak Museum. Barbara Harrisson, a
museum volunteer who had divorced her German forester husband and then
married the last British colonial-era curator, took on the project.2
She aspired to find an alternative to what she perceived as two
impossibilities. On one hand, it was impossible to return orangutan
infants to the wild. Logging decimated their habitats and they would
likely die without their mothers.3
On the other hand, Harrisson was unwilling to send them to old imperial
zoos built in the nineteenth century, like the London Zoo. She thus
experimented with a third way: having them live independently with
minimal support—a kind of independence that could carry on despite her
absence.

This particular experiment of fostering independence from afar was
contemporaneous to active debate about political decolonization.
Neighboring Indonesia, had hosted the Asian-African Conference the
previous year in Bantung, which aimed to represent the interests of the
Third World against colonialism in all of its manifestations
(Abdulgani, 1955; Tsing, 2005). This was a decade after Indonesia
became the first nation to gain independence violently in the twentieth
century (Steedly, 2013). Across the South China Sea, communists in the
British colony of Malaya were actively fighting the “Anti-British
National Liberation War,” otherwise known as the Malayan Emergency.
That war became an example of the brutality of liberal warfare, with
its use of carcinogenic herbicides, forced resettlement, and indefinite
intention (Khalili, 2013). Sarawak’s official decolonization in 1963
meant incorporation into a new nation-state, Malaysia, a plan hatched
by the prime ministers of Britain and Malaya once war in Malaya ended
(Leigh, 1974). The same tactics of liberal warfare used in Malaya were
applied in Sarawak immediately after official decolonization (Yong,
2013).

Harrisson’s experiment occurred at the peripheries of the colonial
state, as revealed in her correspondence with the Department of
Forestry, as well as at the peripheries of modern biology (as her
memoir attests through its description of force-feeding infant
orangutans with glass pipettes), and in the space of the colonial
domicile, which was home to both of the Harrissons, their Malay
housekeeper, and Bidai, a young Selako man who was the son of a shaman
and a friend of the Harrissons (Harrisson, 1962).4
Bidai lived with the Harrissons to learn modern ways of living;
ironically, he did so by teaching orphaned orangutans semi-wild
behaviors.

This was decolonization in the historical sense: a self-professed
British colonial actively experimented with instilling freedom for
indigenous Sarawakians while knowing that colonialism was reaching its
end in the 1950s and 1960s. Decolonization, historically, was about the
anticipated end of direct colonial intervention. How that governance
would end— through violent uprising, diplomacy, or a combination
thereof—was unclear. What was clear was that the state of arrested
autonomy in Sarawak was untenable (Parreñas, in press).5

When I did ethnographic research from 2008 to 2010, I saw how the older
colonial aspiration for orangutans’ independence had remained a future
aspiration. Yet in this recent past, the actors are different. A
private-public partnership between the branch of the Forestry
Department that was privatized in the late 1990s and a British
commercial volunteering company has replaced the efforts of colonial
bureaucracies. People, mostly British women, pay thousands of dollars
to volunteer by assisting Sarawakian subcontracted workers (Parreñas,
2012). The concerns of displaced wildlife continue to be as peripheral
to the postcolonial state as they were to its predecessor. One small
manifestation of this is that the staff has lacked a veterinarian since
the 1990s.

Postcolonial institutions that still carry colonial legacies are
responsible for orangutan rehabilitation, yet I believe there is a
theory and practice of decolonization at stake here, especially when we
turn to the way subcontractors regard their orangutan charges. The
purpose of orangutan rehabilitation, for caretakers like Nadim and
Layang, is to foster independence and mutual vulnerability with their
charges who are acclimated to humans. The idea of independence is
conveyed by the Malay (and Sarawakian Malay) word bebas.

The Malay concept of bebas is significant. While merdeka is connected to emancipation and enfranchisement, which are key ideals in British liberalism, bebas is associated with license and lack of restraint.6
It is the legal term for acquittal and the term for liberation that
contemporary Malaysian and Indonesian youth now use in describing their
aspirations (Idrus, 2016; Lee, 2016). It is the same word for freedom
that anthropologist Aihwa Ong (1987) used to describe young Malay
factory women resisting the patriarchy in which they were raised.

While the sociologist Laleh Khalili (2013, p. 6) writes that “the
freedom of movement is an avowedly fundamental tenet of liberal
rights,” what makes the decolonizing freedom of orangutan
rehabilitation different from the liberal freedom espoused by former
colonial masters and warmongers is the recognition of the bodily
vulnerability that the freedom of decolonization would entail. Both
Nadim and Layang felt that caring for wildlife meant embodying personal
risk. It meant the risk of feeling pain when an orangutan acclimated to
humans bites human flesh. It meant that living out freedom, in the
sense of bebas, meant living out the freedom of shared vulnerability.

The contemporary purpose for orangutan rehabilitation is to have them be bebas
(free). Yet, as Nadim points out, that freedom is mediated by
biological sex and sexual dimorphism and it is gendered beyond human
subjects:

Nadim:
In the wild, there’s lots of trees, lots of space. Here, it’s six
kilometers and not enough. Here, they meet every day! In the wild, they
meet in a year or once every six or seven years…they [female
orangutans] may be free, but living in fear…bebas, tapi takut
[free but fearful]. I pity them when I see their faces. It’s only the
males, when you see them, they’re happy. (Parreñas, in press)

The freedom afforded by the constrained space of the wildlife center
exacerbates relations of forced copulation. Thus the wildlife center
generates a gendered social world for the orangutans held at this site.7

Comparing Nadim and Barbara Harrisson, we see that taking
decolonization seriously entails not only considering the colonial
legacies that structure the space of possibilities for orangutans and
the people caring for them. Following scholars working in the Americas,
like Marisol de la Cadena (2015), it also entails questioning
deep-seated assumptions about who is a political subject and to whom we
are responsible. This is decolonization in its contemporary sense, one
that finds genealogy in liberation movements of the mid-twentieth
century without privileging Enlightenment categories of the human above
nonhuman others.

Like all projects of decolonization, the project of orangutan
rehabilitation opens up difficult questions: whose vision of liberation
or independence comes to matter in decolonization? How much license can
we take when we use terms that are not directly circulating in our
worlds, yet are useful for how we come to grasp what surrounds us? In
other words, why do I hesitate to think through “decoloniality” when
thinking about Sarawak? What kinds of new political imaginaries become
aspirational when we look across colonial legacies and geopolitical
space and time?

A newsbill from Cape Town in November 2014 announced the military protection of perlemoen— Haliotis midae or abalone—which is at risk of extinction.8

A flat mollusk living in the kelp forests that line the shoreline of
the Western Cape, in South Africa, perlemoen finds itself under assault
by Homo sapiens and by lobsters (Jasus lalandii) in the Anthropocene.

Archaeologists working along the coast of South Africa suggest that
perlemoen and other shellfish played a key role in human evolution in
that their omega oils contributed to human brain development. If the
archaeologists are correct, we humans owe them our sapiens. What will
human futures be without them?

Regime-challenging fishers, the historical subjects of colonial
expulsions, prise them off rocks with screwdrivers, in a 24/7 duel with
fisheries management and a partnership with global illegal traders in
abalone (Platt, 2016).

At the same time, rock lobsters have adapted to rising ocean
temperatures and the effects of city sewerage outfalls by changing
their location and diet. Adult lobsters have migrated south and
initiated what invasion biologists call “ecological regime shift,”
changing their diets to consume the sea urchins that used to shelter
baby abalone.

However, amid a science caught in a nature-culture divide—in which the
attention is almost always on either people or critters, but seldom
both—it is against the poachers that the army has been called in.

Fishers ask: Why and how, in a democracy, can a perlemoen have better representation in Parliament than we do?

The situation is surreal, and it strains the social contract. Is it not
surreal to mobilize a war machine to protect a snail? Can the army
protect the perlemoen from the lobsters that are migrating into the
kelp forests?

There are many other surrealisms. There is the surrealism of an
environmental management regime financially dependent on the sale of
confiscated poaching hauls. There is the situation of the environmental
scientist who, in the neoliberal financialized version of the
environment in South Africa’s constitution, finds herself advising on
policing the rights of some humans over others.

Unsurprisingly, scientific authority is in question in South Africa.

Where the environmentalist—almost always white—criminalizes poachers in
order to save species from extinction, she or he slips into the role of
the bearer of the white man’s burden”—the legacy of a colonial project
to save the world via religion or science or both. When scientific
authoritarianism is brought to bear on environmental resource
management, there is an inescapable slippage into what in apartheid
South Africa was called baasskap, the relation of mastery.

If environmental activism and environmental science is to be effective
as South Africans address climate-induced ecological disorder, the life
sciences need to find a voice other than that of the master who will
exercise military might. But in order to do that, a different
articulation of subject-object relations is required. How to do that
when that very relation is assumed in scholarly ways of knowing?
Unmaking that relation of mastery has been a focus in the postcolonial
social sciences and human geography (De Greef & Raemaekers, 2014;
De Greef, 2014).

Yet it is the abalones’ multiple vulnerabilities, across species and
across economies illegal and legal, that convoke us to think about
ecologies in ways that are unfamiliar in the frames available in
science via territorialist biology and in law via the humans-only
social contract. The convergence of climate disorder with decolonial
questions of how we got here puts to flight the idea that marine
conservation is about ecologies becoming pristine again. Instead of
attending to beings and becomings, we find ourselves attending to
hauntings and unbecomings.

Our choice amid this is to fight over who or what has mastery of the
truth of the abalone and therefore what regime ought to be enforced, or
to rethink the trope of mastery. For decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter,
that is the question that makes us think. In a recent reflection on the
Anthropocene, she criticized the “knowing We” in an Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report: “The referent-we—whose normal
behaviours are destroying our planet—is that of the human population as
a whole. The ‘we’ who are destroying the planet in these [IPCC]
findings are not understood as the referent-we of Homo oeconomicus (a
we that includes themselves/ourselves as bourgeois academics)” (in
McKittrick, 2015, p. 24). In other words, for Wynter, addressing
climate disorder requires addressing the entanglement of the figure of
the knowledgeable human with the neoliberal gods of reason. For Bruno
Latour, these are “technical efficiency, economic profitability, and
scientific objectivity” (2007, p. 14). Wynter wants to address the
entanglement of the praxis of scholarship with the neoliberal cosmos.

For perlemoen, Homooeconomicus
has no answer to their dilemma of how to survive the lobster migration
that is changing the kelp-forest ecology at the same time as historical
forces create a lucrative market for a desperate “precariat” tied in to
gangs and the drug trade. Their problem is surreal in the face of the
realisms in which it is rendered, for it has the same roots as the
situation contemporary poachers face. Extinctions, expulsions,
extractions, and ocean warming are inextricably linked; poachers,
perlemoen, and lobster alike are trying to survive not only an
ecological politics but a conceptualization of ecology and society that
creates their hostile cosmos. Their crisis is not only ecological or
social, nor is it even social-ecological. It is cosmopolitical.

In such a cosmopolitical crisis, we need the “Dostoyevskian idiot”
described by Isabelle Stengers (2005): someone who is unable to ask the
right questions.

As a white South African social scientist writing in a moment where the
decolonial movement has put the university in crisis, I have found
myself many times learning slowly to welcome not-knowing: learning to
not be the keeper of a disciplinary kingdom, and to be alert to the
practices of gods of reason in a university system (Green, 2015) in
which the very fact of whiteness has long served to authorize thought.
Part of escaping the habits of authority is learning to circle around a
problem, to think the whole situation again—including its “obvious” and
“of course” aspects.

With that in mind, let us return to the situation of the perlemoen.
That which authorizes logic in fisheries management has been a Homo oeconomicus
model of fisheries, in which the base stock is the capital, the
juveniles are the interest, and you should only withdraw less than the
interest earned (Green, 2016). What that banking model does is enact
the ocean as an ATM from which cash has to be withdrawn. Relations of
care for the kelp forests and rock pools, which have a deep history
along the coast, are expunged. Might a different approach to the logic
of conservation—not as dollarized ecosystem services—enable fishers to
reclaim a different set of relations with the ocean that are based on
care and on “thinking like a fish” (Duggan, Green & Jarre, 2014)?

It would be easy to dismiss the question as the naive ramblings of an
esoteric social scientist who is out of touch with the “real world.”
Yet acceptance of the idea of “the real world” is bound up in the same
gods of reason who created the economized and militarized relations
that compound the very situations we entreat them to resolve.

What is needed is a different approach to the problem: one that begins
with conceptualizing the multiple experiences of a problematic
situation without presuming that the authorized version encompasses all
there is to know.

A deep tradition of authority across sub-Saharan Africa that declines
the rhetoric of authorial authority is that of the dilemma tale
(Bascom, 1975). In a dilemma tale, the art of authorship is not, as in
the essay form, to persuade your listeners that you are right, but to
stage a discussion of what is ethical or what each actor might do next.
Dilemma tales offer a mode of engagement very similar to Amazonian
perspectivism: understanding that the world is constantly in formation
by the beings and actants that navigate it. In this approach, knowing
is not simply a question of “understanding information of the world”
but of “understanding the world in-formation.” The different form of
authorship here is not the authorial “authority over,” but the
authorial capacity to bring listeners into a “presence-to” the breadth
of a situation (Green & Green, 2013). The knowledge they honor is
less about the knowledge of the “beings” of each creature but about the
“becomings” of a situation: who will do what next?

Being able to understand what will unfold next is also an art of
knowledge in Chinese thought that attends to the propensities of
things, as described by Francois Jullien (1995). In Amerindian
perspectivism, in African dilemma tales, and in Chinese thought, we can
begin to see that the attention of coloniality-modernity to things and
direct causal relations is something of an anomaly among many
intellectual heritages. With regards to the perlemoen, the form of the
dilemma tale offers a way of staging an encounter of perlemoen,
lobsters, fishers, poachers, environmental managers, the army, and
marine biologists. To me, decoloniality is a praxis that is not about
offering a new kingdom of thought to replace the disciplines nor about
generating a new field of study: it begins with a transformation of how
we think about what it is to know.

——— (2015, 24 June). The changing of the gods of reason: Cecil John
Rhodes, Karoo fracking and the decolonising of the Anthropocene. e-Flux Supercommunity: Apocalypsis. Retrieved from http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-changing-of-the-gods-of-reason

I begin with an important conceptual lesson taught to me by an animal
husbandry technician and small farmer. Our conversations occurred in
the Andean-Amazonian foothills of Colombia, where I have been
conducting fieldwork and accompanying what I call agro-life popular
processes over the last thirteen years. Southwestern Colombia has been
an epicenter of what was, until recently, the country’s over-fifty-year
social and armed conflict, as well as the focal point of militarized
US–Colombia antinarcotics policy since the late 1990s. This farmer
friend, Heraldo Vallejo, explained to me that modernizing agricultural
practices and neocolonial legacies of violent extractivism have
alienated rural communities to the point where “they do not know where
they were standing.” Not knowing where one is standing does not refer
to knowing the soil through a laboratory analysis of its chemical
fertility, pH level, or scientific taxonomy. Indeed, Heraldo
demonstrated how, rather than sending a soil sample off to an
urban-based laboratory and paying for chemical analysis, farmers could
compare the soil where they intend to cultivate with fecund animal
manure on the farm. Applying hydrogen peroxide to both the soil and the
manure, then comparing the intensity of the effervescent cackle of
microbial life is a way to determine whether a soil is healthy and apt
for cultivating.

The reason to avoid consulting a soil science laboratory is not only a
question of reducing costs and external dependencies in a precarious
peasant farmer economy where rural communities rarely have access to
such technology.9
It emerges from the ontological differences between treating soils as
artificial strata or, at best, natural bodies that can routinely be
chemically manipulated and interacting with soils as living worlds that
are inextricable from their ecological relations. In fact, as Heraldo
engaged in the experiment, he told me it was not a question of knowing
but of learning how to cultivate (and also recover) different
practices, aptitudes, dispositions, and affects. His emphasis on
open-ended processes of learning that do not result in the accumulation
of universally applicable knowledge reveals a tension that he, and
other farmers I met, have not only with many agricultural sciences and
their productivist imperatives but also with the category of knowledge
itself, when it is separated from learning as a humbling, shared (as in
multilateral and not only human), ongoing, and situated process.10

This is not because these farmers reject the teachings of soil science,
ecology, or microbiology entirely, as evidenced in the above anecdote
about relating to chemical versus biological soils. Rather, Heraldo and
other farmers interface with these sciences and their technological
apparatuses by subjecting them to the rigor of local demands, visions,
and agroecological conditions. Scientific practices that support
farmers’ liberation from capitalist imperatives and extractive-based
logics while also responsibly addressing and emerging from
Amazonian-based problems may be incorporated into their agricultural
life projects. Simultaneously, these farmers engage with specific
practices they learn from their parents and extended family members and
ones they continually learn in their exchanges with neighboring
Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and other peasant farmers. For example,
Heraldo told me how his Nasa indigenous neighbors taught him to plant
in fields recently struck by lightning because these fields become more
fertile. The Nasa had reached this conclusion by witnessing the upsurge
of mushroom caps after a storm. Heraldo later read a scientific
explanation of the way nitrogen molecules are shattered by lightning
bolts, fertilize the air, and then penetrate the ground in falling
raindrops. This was a case, he explained, where popular practices match
up with scientific ones. However, there are innumerable popular
practices that have no scientific equivalent and that form part of or
are actively being reincorporated into farm and forest life.11 The
recovery and innovational reworking of these practices is occurring
after decades when rural communities eliminated most agrobiodiversity
and food production to grow monoculture coca—what stigmatizing state
antidrug campaigns call “narcocrops/narco-seeded plots” or la mata que mata (the plant that kills).

Heraldo and other farmers I met throughout the Andean-Amazonian
foothills and plains are not trapped in an either/or world that pits
knowledge against belief. Nor do they make a multicultural or hybridist
move to simply place scientific practices that are “locally
appropriate” in analytic and material symmetry with alternative or
popular practices.12 Scientific practices, even when they address
Amazonian problems responsibly, are categorically (and not only
relatively) different from the kinds of practices and practitioners
that emerge when one lives, dies, and defends a territory under
military duress. For these farmers, the modernizing agricultural
sciences can easily become parasitic. Such practices can show their
colonial sides when they are deemed “knowledge” that absorbs
nonscientifically derived practices and/or renders them obsolete under
the capitalist imperatives of standardization, competitiveness, and
intellectual property.

Within science-studies scholarship, there have been moves to
“democratize” knowledge production in different global contexts under
more plural conceptualizations of science and modernity (see, for
example, Harding, 2008; Medina, da Costa Marques, & Holmes et al.,
2014). More recently, scholars interested in decentering science
studies from English/Euro-American analytics have proposed what they
call a “postcolonial version of the principle of symmetry” to ask “what
might happen if STS were to make more systematic use of non-Western
ideas” (Law & Lin, 2015 p. 2). Ethnographic conceptualizations at
the interfaces of postcolonial and feminist science studies have made
important contributions to understanding the kinds of ontological
tensions that exist and that are necessarily maintained between
divergent knowledge traditions and world-making practices (see, for
example, Verran, 2002; 2013, de la Cadena, 2010; Lyons, 2014; de la
Cadena & Lien et al., 2015).

Of course, within and beyond the confines of academic debates,
encounters between “Western” and “non-Western” ideas in the Americas
have been ongoing since the Conquest and the control of the Atlantic
after 1492. Focusing on the specificities of Spanish and Portuguese
colonialisms, Latin American and diasporic scholars based in the United
States have insisted that we think with the “triad
modernity/coloniality/decoloniality” (Castro-Gómez, 2005; Escobar,
2007; Giraldo, 2016), arguing that these violent colonial encounters
and their enduring structural effects are constitutive of modernity and
the making of a capitalist world system. When indigenous, peasant,
Afro-descendent, feminist, and popular sectors chant “500 años de colonialismo”
(“500 years of colonialism”) during mobilizations across Latin America,
they are engaged in struggles against specific forms of ongoing
coloniality that are conceptualized in ways other than
“postcolonial.”13 However, as Tania Pérez-Bustos notes in this series,
this does not mean that a decolonial paradigm should become a singular
explanatory tool to discuss the commitments and practices of diverse
popular struggles and radical thinkers across the hemisphere.

In an epistemic sense, the production of modern scientific disciplines
has occurred within asymmetrical power relations of ongoing
coloniality. The historical production of scientific knowledge has
always entailed its constitutive outsides: not only in terms of the
making of the category of “science” pitted against “religion,”
“superstition,” and “belief,” but also in the ongoing appropriation of
diverse practices—and hence worlds—that continues to allow scientific
practitioners to claim to authoritatively “know” a singular reality. My
intention is not to gloss over diverse scientific traditions by simply
defining them as rooted in the projects and practices of colonialism,
or to underestimate the critical perspectives and subversive potential
of scientists working within unequally distributed global positions. I
am interested in exploring the limits of symmetry as a conceptual and
political tool when placed in conversation with the kinds of
alternative practices in which Heraldo and other farmers engage as they
strive to “decolonize their farms,” as they call it.

The practices of the farmers I have been accompanying do not seek to
democratize science—in other words, to open inclusive spaces for what
some call ancestral, traditional, or popular saberes
(wisdoms or know-how) within neoliberalized science-policy culture, or
place science at the disposal of the interests of civil society as
though a dualistic division exists between the two. The promises and
practices of democratization may or may not take on relevance and are
always situated political and social processes, rather than universal
aspirations. This is heightened when rural communities are criminalized
due to their presumed engagement in illicit economic activities, their
defense of territories against extractivism, and by the fact that they
live in areas that are militarized and also occupied by paralegal armed
groups. By illicit economic activities, I refer not only to the
cultivation of illicit crops in Colombia, but also to the incremental
criminalization of a whole variety of popular and ancestral food
production, commercialization, and seed-propagating practices vis-à-vis
neoliberal reforms that favor the interests of multinational corporate
chemical-seed conglomerates.

Certain modern agricultural technologies are actively incorporated into
small farmers’ labor when they enable liberatory potential within the
relational conditions of Amazonian ecologies. However, peasant farmers
in the western Amazon taught me that asymmetrical engagements between
practices remain ethically and strategically important as a
political—or, better yet, life—proposal. This is an asymmetry that
subverts the authority granted to scientific knowledge and its nexus
with capitalist forms of accumulation over a myriad of other
nonscientific practices and anti- and noncapitalist ethics. These kinds
of asymmetrical analytical and material engagements resist the
appropriation of popular practices by different scientific disciplines
and acknowledge the historical and ongoing debts these sciences owe to
the worlds they marginalize(d). Rather than assuming the fixed
locations of subjugation that a “postcolonial symmetry” proposes to
unravel, it is also conceptually and politically important to consider
situated “decolonizing” enactments and versions of asymmetry.

A Word of Caution toward Homogenous Appropriations of Decolonial Thinking In STSTania Pérez-Bustos

These lines are a provocation, a word of caution, a question posed in
response to the questions asked about the role of decolonial theory in
the thinking of science and technology studies (STS) nowadays. When I
was invited to participate in this discussion, my first reaction was to
say, “Shall I be part of this?” I am familiar with these theoretical
proposals, with the distinctions between postcoloniality and the triad
of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (Santiago Castro-Gómez, 2005;
Giraldo, 2016), as much as with the tensions between them and within
coloniality/decoloniality thinking. I do not, however, affiliate with
any of these proposals—in fact, I do not affiliate with hardly any
school of thought or particular theory. I find these proposals useful
since they have helped me to think and question, in particular, the
feminist politics of the circulation of popular science and technology
in countries such as India and Colombia (Pérez-Bustos, 2014). Thus, my
position toward decoloniality has mostly been marked by my anecdotal
encounters with literature proposing the decolonial option (Santiago
Castro Gómez & Grosfoguel, 2007).14 It is from anecdotal encounters with these ideas as partial tools that I can speak. I do not see them as paradigms.

In the case of modernity/coloniality and decoloniality, I see the faces
of particular people behind these concepts: mostly well-known male
scholars based in the United states who attempt to think from Latin
America, but also male scholars based in different corners of Latin
America trying to differentiate themselves from their Northern
counterparts. I see invisible appropriations of feminist knowledge
produced in the South as much as in the North.15I
see a game of mirrors and invisibilities propitiated by the
inaudibility of knowledge produced otherwise. I think about this,
keeping Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s words in mind:

Mignolo
and company have built a small empire within the empire…have adopted
the ideas of subaltern studies and have launched discussions in Latin
America, creating a jargon, a conceptual apparatus and forms of
reference and counterreference which have produced an academic
detachment with the commitments and dialogues with insurgent social
forces. (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010, my translation)

With this, I am not saying that there is nothing to learn
from what these authors write. Better yet, I should say to what these
autores write in order to emphasize their gender position. What I am
saying is that certain discourses of decoloniality may run the risk of
existing within certain politics of appropriation and
decontextualization through which certain voices are audible and others
are not, and it is with this politics that decoloniality becomes. Or,
as one of the reviewers of this paper helped me to highlight, these
circuits of audibility, appropriation, decontextualization, gender, and
coloniality shape the very possibility of discussing decoloniality in
STS.
While writing this, because I am Latin American, I keep wondering what
it means and what the implications of my words (or the expectations for
them) are in relation to decolonial terms and the genealogy of these
terms in Latin America. I say this because I come from a region with
very particular histories of colonization, one that has pushed a group
of scholars to think about these categories for a very particular
period. During this period these scholars discussed and highlighted
(initially) the differences between processes of colonization and
argued, in varied, intricate, and complex ways, the need to understand
that modernity is a product of coloniality (Santiago Castro-Gómez &
Grosfoguel, 2007; Giraldo, 2016). Thus, while recalling Michelle
Murphy’s words (2016), decoloniality cannot be otherwise, cannot be
thought outside those frames. This in the sense that decoloniality
emerges out of coloniality as a counterface of modernity, and it is
dissenting within (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012) these conditions of
possibility that decoloniality can become. It is the triad concept we
are dealing with. However, when I think of how the Latin American
genealogy of this concept is being used and appropriated in STS
(Harding, 2016), I do not necessarily see a triad. I see a fuzzy word
filled with hope and expectations, a word being used in a homogeneous
way, a word lacking history and complexity, plurality and
entanglements. Then I remember (how could I forget?) that language is
an issue in the academic world (Pérez-Bustos, 2017: 59-72). That
writing in English and not in Castilian Spanish or Catalan or
Portuguese or, even more, in Aymara or Quechua is not neutral. It
embodies a very particular coloniality of knowledge, of being, of
power, depending on where you stand (or sit) (Wöhrer, 2016).

Coloniality as a concept (because I insist that we cannot talk about
decoloniality without asking how it is built by coloniality as a
necessary precursor of modernity, and as a triad) emerged in Latin
America at 1998, and it was discussed for a decade. However, when this
genealogy has more recently been used in the Northern Anglo-Saxon
world, it often relies on the translation of this work (see Harding,
2016). However, what has been translated? What has not? Why? Are we
only relying on translated sources or on decolonial thinking produced
by Latin American thinkers based in the North? What does it imply that
perhaps one is reading certain people from Caribbean and Latin American
critical thought but not others? There is something interesting in what
is translated and heard, but we also need to recognize its partiality
and its politics of appropriation and circulation, or else we may fail
to acknowledge the impact of that partiality. I am not arguing that we
need to be universal in any way, but rather that we must question the
privilege of our point of view and take a reflective stand toward how
decoloniality is used and produced in its incorporation into STS, and
how this incorporation includes silences and blind spots.

In this context, which frames the emergence of the triad of
modernity/coloniality/decoloniality in Latin America as much as its
partial translation, I wonder to what extent using the term here,
speaking about decoloniality in Latin America without acknowledging and
understanding where it comes from and the differences it embraces, its
inner heterogeneity, is not another (of many) examples of cognitive and
epistemic injustice (Visvanathan, 2009). With this I suggest that
having and embodying the privilege of speaking and writing and being
embedded in the lingua franca of science seems to give Anglo-Saxon
scholars the right to appropriate concepts partially and make theory
out of them. This is usually impossible for academics in the
non-Anglo-Saxon South who do not have the privilege of whiteness
(symbolically as much as materially speaking) or have not worked hard
enough toward having it (studying in the North and building and being
part of certain networks) (Wöhrer, 2016).

Thus, how homogeneous is the idea of decoloniality being used in
Northern contexts? What kind of systematic ignorance accompanies this
homogeneity? Whose singularities are being lost in terms of theory?
Why? Is the use of decoloniality, or better yet the search for
decoloniality, decolonial enough? Decolonial in what sense? Or is this
search for decoloniality actually reproducing certain geopolitics of
knowledge and logics of colonialism? From my experience as a feminist
STS scholar based in Colombia and not representing anyone, with my
singular voice, I would say it might be.

1
The histories and complexities of these social movements are beyond the
scope of this essay, but for an example of how the concept of the
decolonial is circulating therein as an extension of Franz Fanon’s and
Steve Biko’s works, see Ngcaweni (2016).

2
Barbara Harrisson was German by birth, although she spoke of herself as
a British colonial when I interviewed her in 2006. During World War II,
she worked as a typist in the Abwehr, the espionage group within the
Third Reich’s armed forces that Hitler disbanded toward the end of the
war because of its internal subterfuge against his rule (Heimann,
1998). Her move to the tropics following World War II seems to parallel
the movements of Nazi women closely associated with Hitler, such as
Hannah Reitsch, the pilot and Iron Cross recipient who became close to
Third World leader Kwame Nkrumah and helped establish Ghana’s air force
in the early years of independence (Allman, 2013). However, Harrisson’s
efforts were not directed by a confident futurism of a new nation-state
but were a series of uncertain trials and error.

3
Orangutan infants usually spend around the first seven years of their
lives with their mothers (Galdikas, 1981; Galdikas & Wood, 1990).

4
Barbara Harrisson’s story is one where colonial science converges with
gendered science (Anderson, 2002, 2006; Anderson & Adams, 2008; von
Oertzen, Rentetzi, & Watkins, 2013). Bidai’s father was a Pengulu,
a title that designated an indigenous leader. Harrisson describes his
father’s assumed role as that of both a political and shamanistic
leader.

5
Arrested autonomy describes the condition in which forcibly being made
dependent is understood as the means of gaining independence. In
effect, that independence is always indefinitely deferred.

6Like
many abstract terms in Malay, merdeka has roots in Sanskrit, conveying
roots in the ancient Srivijaya and Majapahit imperial courtly and elite
cultures that connected the region. This word was distinguished from
the term bebas, which orientalists like John Crawfurd reckoned
originated from Johor on the peninsula; it spread through Malay’s usage
as the vernacular trade language throughout the archipelago. Bebas
seemed to represent something more excessive or even “wild,” distant
from “civilized”courtly culture and even further from the ideas of
liberty conveyed in the writings of John Locke and John Stuart Mill and
through the stately sense of the term merdeka (Rutherford, 2012;
Steedly, 2013). Marsden’s translations of the terms free and liberty in
the 1812 edition of A Dictionary and Grammar of the Malayan Language
convey this: “Free (manumitted) mardika…(unrestrained) bibas…Liberty
(enfranchisement) ka-mardika-an; (permission) mohon, bibas” (1984, pp.
451, 482). Merdeka corresponds to liberal ideas of political
independence (Kirksey, 2012; Rutherford, 2012; Steedly, 2013).

7 For an explanation of how nonhuman animals have gender, please see Parreñas (2017).

9
The soil’s treatment in dominant agronomic circles almost exclusively
prioritizes soil fertility and structure because of the roles granted
to these properties in agricultural production and chemical input
substitution. This is particularly evident in the Colombian
government’s new Servientrega suelos service, which I euphemistically
translate as “door-to-door soil analysis,” where rural farmers can send
soil samples to an urban laboratory through a mailing service and
within ten days receive a soil study and technical recommendations for
the chemical fertilization of a particular commercial crop. See
“Análisis de suelo” (2017). I thank my colleague Julio Arias Vanegas
for drawing my attention to this article.

11 See
Green (Ed., 2013) for further discussion about the decolonial
possibilities that may emerge when environmental sciences push beyond
simply selecting pieces of “alternative” or Indigenous knowledges that
appear to match up with scientific knowledges.

12
In his ethnographic exploration of environmental politics in
present-day Hong Kong, Tim Choy (2005) alerts us to the fact that the
imperative for scientific expertise to perform its “local
appropriateness” may be a relativist critique already inhabited by the
postcolonial state.

13
I am in no way arguing that postcolonial scholarship and subaltern
studies have not been influential among political activists and
scholars in and of Latin America. However, my research is informed by a
genealogy of Latin American critical theory, which includes dependency
theory, liberation theology, participatory action research, and a
current of thought or movement that is sometimes referred to as pensamiento latinoamericano en ciencia, tecnología y sociedad (Latin American thinking on science, technology, and society). See also Subramaniam, Foster, Harding, Roy and Tallbear (2017).

14I
refer to this encounter as anecdotal in the sense that it is defined by
my possible and partial access to the literature in the South,
considering that the circuits of knowledge circulation tend to
privilege North-to-South trajectories and not South-to-South fluxes
(Femenías, 2007).

15I
refer here to the work of feminists reflecting on decoloniality such as
Latinx feminists working in the North, like María Lugones (2008), Breny
Mendoza (2010), and Isis Giraldo (2016); Latin American feminists based
in the South, like Marta Cabrera and Liliana Vargas Monroy (2014), Ochy
Curiel (2007), and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010); and feminists from
the North living in the South, such as Catherine Walsh (2004).